236 colors on the screen

From my work with graphics programming, AFAIK a video card only has
256 entries in its active palette. 20 of these are reserved by
Windows. This leaves only 236 simultaneous colors for dots on the
screen at one time. Each of these colors has it's own r, g, and b
values. With 8 bits of intensity for each of those you get a
theoretical palette of 16 million colors from which you can select any
236 at a time.

However, I never see this mentioned in all the discussions of color in
this NG. Surely it affects how images look on the screen. For example,
if this is true, you can never display a grayscale with more than 236
different levels of intensity.

While this might be more than enough for a gray scale, when you put
all the colors in a photo on the screen, I would think the 236 color
limit would be important.

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BioColor wrote:
> Hi,
>
> From my work with graphics programming, AFAIK a video card only has
> 256 entries in its active palette. 20 of these are reserved by
> Windows. This leaves only 236 simultaneous colors for dots on the
> screen at one time. Each of these colors has it's own r, g, and b
> values. With 8 bits of intensity for each of those you get a
> theoretical palette of 16 million colors from which you can select any
> 236 at a time.

Today's video cards don't use palettes - they typically have 8 bits of
red, 8 of green, and 8 of blue. How long ago was your graphics
programming?

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On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 16:28:49 GMT, BioColor <> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>From my work with graphics programming, AFAIK a video card only has
>256 entries in its active palette. 20 of these are reserved by
>Windows. This leaves only 236 simultaneous colors for dots on the
>screen at one time. Each of these colors has it's own r, g, and b
>values. With 8 bits of intensity for each of those you get a
>theoretical palette of 16 million colors from which you can select any
>236 at a time.
>
>However, I never see this mentioned in all the discussions of color in
>this NG. Surely it affects how images look on the screen. For example,
>if this is true, you can never display a grayscale with more than 236
>different levels of intensity.
>
>While this might be more than enough for a gray scale, when you put
>all the colors in a photo on the screen, I would think the 236 color
>limit would be important.
>
>What am I missing?

What you are missing is a video card that was made in the last 10
years.

Where the hell are you? Elbonia?

Today's (and even those of 5 years ago) video cards are not limited by
this palette method any more, although they can still use it if you
wish, most people run their video cards in high-color (16 bit) or
true-color modes (24 bit) paletteless colors.

In article <>,
BioColor <> wrote:
>Hi,
>While this might be more than enough for a gray scale, when you put
>all the colors in a photo on the screen, I would think the 236 color
>limit would be important.
>
>What am I missing?

Possibly the fact that for the last decade, consumer video cards have
allowed high resolution "true-colour" displays which don't indirect via a
256 entry LUT, but just allocate a 32 bit word for each pixel and store a
full RGB triplet in each one, allowing each pixel on the screen to take any
one of the 16,777,216 colours that exist in a 24 bit colour range?

As all of the other posters have mentioned, this hasn't been in use for
something like at least a decade. In fact, I have an old computer across
the room set up for Windows 95. It was upgraded from Windows for
Workgroups, version 3.11. It is at least ten years old. It has **always**
been set up for the so called "high-color" (16 bit) video mode.

What you are missing ... is about the last ten to fifteen years.

"BioColor" <> wrote in message
news:...
> Hi,
>
> From my work with graphics programming, AFAIK a video card only has
> 256 entries in its active palette. 20 of these are reserved by
> Windows. This leaves only 236 simultaneous colors for dots on the
> screen at one time. Each of these colors has it's own r, g, and b
> values. With 8 bits of intensity for each of those you get a
> theoretical palette of 16 million colors from which you can select any
> 236 at a time.
>
> However, I never see this mentioned in all the discussions of color in
> this NG. Surely it affects how images look on the screen. For example,
> if this is true, you can never display a grayscale with more than 236
> different levels of intensity.
>
> While this might be more than enough for a gray scale, when you put
> all the colors in a photo on the screen, I would think the 236 color
> limit would be important.
>
> What am I missing?
>
> TIA
> Duncan
>

Kibo informs me that BioColor <> stated that:
>Hi,
>
>From my work with graphics programming, AFAIK a video card only has
>256 entries in its active palette. 20 of these are reserved by
>Windows. This leaves only 236 simultaneous colors for dots on the
>screen at one time. Each of these colors has it's own r, g, and b
>values. With 8 bits of intensity for each of those you get a
>theoretical palette of 16 million colors from which you can select any
>236 at a time.

I don't think I've seen a PC with palette-based video in ten years or
more. Modern machines are usually 24 bit colour, & often 32 bit colour.
>However, I never see this mentioned in all the discussions of color in
>this NG. Surely it affects how images look on the screen. For example,
>if this is true, you can never display a grayscale with more than 236
>different levels of intensity.
>
>While this might be more than enough for a gray scale, when you put
>all the colors in a photo on the screen, I would think the 236 color
>limit would be important.

The traditional method was to grab most of the palette, assign a very
carefully selected set of colours to it, & use error-diffusion dithering
to simulate 24 bit colour. (It worked surprisingly well if you were a
yard or more away from the screen.) Fortunately, we don't have to jump
through those sorts of hoops any more.

ROTFL
>
>Today's (and even those of 5 years ago) video cards are not limited by
>this palette method any more, although they can still use it if you
>wish, most people run their video cards in high-color (16 bit) or
>true-color modes (24 bit) paletteless colors.

Ah. Silly me. It's very cold here in Elbonia, and my brain must have
been frozen.

I take files of floating point numbers and, for display, I convert
them to those RGB intensities using a palette. With the image on the
screen, I interactively modify the colors by modifying the palette (in
my brand new Radeon card), instead of destructively modifying the rgb
intensities of each dot on the screen in a non-palettized mode.

Fortunately, all the new cards still support palettes.

The original code and concept are from 1975. After a bunch of ports
and rewrites, it finally ended up on a PC when you needed $8,000 worth
of extra hardware to show anything beyond monochrome. A few years ago
the 8-bit color other posters have recalled began to misbehave on the
newer cards, and I rewrote it to work in truecolor. I still use the
palettes, though, and they are still limited to 236 colors in VB.

BioColor <> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> From my work with graphics programming, AFAIK a video card only has
> 256 entries in its active palette. 20 of these are reserved by
> Windows. This leaves only 236 simultaneous colors for dots on the
> screen at one time. Each of these colors has it's own r, g, and b
> values. With 8 bits of intensity for each of those you get a
> theoretical palette of 16 million colors from which you can select any
> 236 at a time.

This is actually correct (ish) for about, er, 1991, when my 1-megabyte
Trident 8900 video card could do 1024x768x8-bits and you paid zillions
of dollars for 24-bit graphics on an SGI.
> What am I missing?
>

scott <> wrote:
>
> 32-bit colour? Not heard that one before, how many bits are for RBG,
> something like 10,12,10 ???

IIRC you use less bits for blue if you're doing 8-bit non-palette
graphics; I used to use the Research Machines colour graphics card in
the early 80s and that had 3 bits of red, 3 bits of green and 2 bits of
blue in its palette.

Kibo informs me that "scott" <> stated that:
>> I don't think I've seen a PC with palette-based video in ten years
>> or more. Modern machines are usually 24 bit colour, & often 32 bit
>> colour.
>
>32-bit colour? Not heard that one before, how many bits are for RBG,
>something like 10,12,10 ???

IIRC, it'll be 8x3, plus an alpha channel, or 10x3, & I have no idea the
extra bits are used for, if anything.

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 17:47:38 GMT, "scott" <> wrote:
>> I don't think I've seen a PC with palette-based video in ten years
>> or more. Modern machines are usually 24 bit colour, & often 32 bit
>> colour.
>
>32-bit colour? Not heard that one before, how many bits are for RBG,
>something like 10,12,10 ???

<g>

I can't remember the exact number of bits involved, but modern video
introduce the concept of transparency - alpha channel. It needs some
bits.

I'm guessing 24 bits for color (8 bits per channel) and 8 bits for the
alpha channel. Legend suggests you get better performance in 32 bit
mode due to the byte boundary thing.

scott wrote:
>
> > I don't think I've seen a PC with palette-based video in ten years
> > or more. Modern machines are usually 24 bit colour, & often 32 bit
> > colour.
>
> 32-bit colour? Not heard that one before, how many bits are for RBG,
> something like 10,12,10 ???

With a 32-bit operating system (Win 95 upwards) it is more efficient
from the processor pov to shift data in 32-bit chunks. 32-bit graphics
cards actually only use 24-bit color, but the extra byte goes along for
efficiency. I don't know what's in it tho'.

scott wrote:
>> I don't think I've seen a PC with palette-based video in ten years
>> or more. Modern machines are usually 24 bit colour, & often 32 bit
>> colour.
>
> 32-bit colour? Not heard that one before, how many bits are for RBG,
> something like 10,12,10 ???

Running windows.. If you right click on the desktop, and then choose
Properties -> Settings.

In the settings tab, you should see see the option to choose 32 bit color.

As others have mentioned, it provides the same number of colors
as 24 bit.. The extra bits are for the alpha channel..

"Colin D" <ColinD@killspam.127.0.0.1> wrote in message
news:421E58CF.E887AD10@killspam.127.0.0.1...
>
>
> scott wrote:
>>
>> > I don't think I've seen a PC with palette-based video in ten years
>> > or more. Modern machines are usually 24 bit colour, & often 32 bit
>> > colour.
>>
>> 32-bit colour? Not heard that one before, how many bits are for RBG,
>> something like 10,12,10 ???
>
> With a 32-bit operating system (Win 95 upwards) it is more efficient
> from the processor pov to shift data in 32-bit chunks. 32-bit graphics
> cards actually only use 24-bit color, but the extra byte goes along for
> efficiency. I don't know what's in it tho'.
>
> Colin

My computer is set to 32 bit, there is no 24bit mode, only 16 below that. If
this is true, I can se why there is no 24bit mode.
John

On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 11:44:31 +1300, Colin D wrote:
>
>
> scott wrote:
>>
>> > I don't think I've seen a PC with palette-based video in ten years or
>> > more. Modern machines are usually 24 bit colour, & often 32 bit
>> > colour.
>>
>> 32-bit colour? Not heard that one before, how many bits are for RBG,
>> something like 10,12,10 ???
>
> With a 32-bit operating system (Win 95 upwards) it is more efficient from
> the processor pov to shift data in 32-bit chunks. 32-bit graphics cards
> actually only use 24-bit color, but the extra byte goes along for
> efficiency. I don't know what's in it tho'.

24-bits are used for the RGB colour triple and sometimes the remaining
8 bits are used to implement an alpha channel (i.e. for blending and
mixing). Freqently, the remaining 8 bits are left unused, purely to
improve performance.
> Colin

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